As part of the Valentine Parks & Trails Master Plan, I designed and facilitated a series of interactive public workshops to engage residents in shaping the future of local recreation. Hosted at a popular community gathering spot, the workshops featured multiple themed stations where participants rotated in small groups, reacted to concept ideas, and ranked priorities for parks, trails, and recreation facilities. Facilitators collected qualitative feedback while a marble-voting activity allowed residents to “vote” on proposals by assigning high, medium, or low priority levels. This process not only sparked meaningful conversations about Valentine’s recreation future but also generated actionable data that guided the City Council in developing a comprehensive plan aligned with community values. The engagement effort successfully combined input from the general public with insights from key stakeholders, creating a shared vision to enhance recreation opportunities and strengthen Valentine’s identity as a gateway to the Niobrara National Scenic River.

Partner: Outdoor Adventures, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date: 2023-

Assistance Areas: Outdoor Recreation, Public Land, Rivers

The Nebraska River Residency is a collaborative experiment to reconnect people with Nebraska’s rivers and reimagine them as public trails, creative spaces, and corridors of life. In a state with limited public lands but more river miles than any other, we set out as a group of artists, citizen scientists, life-long learners and kids to explore our nearby nature and crowdsource a paddling guide that blends practical how-to knowledge with landscape history, field observations, and creative responses.

The Platte River Classroom, our first iteration, invited participants to paddle and document a 79-mile stretch of the Platte River. Along the way, we shared knowledge, recorded stories, sketched, wrote, and collected data to create an interactive online map and a forthcoming art-book style field guide. Future residencies will expand to the Elkhorn, Blue, and Dismal Rivers—gathering local knowledge and building a community of river stewards who celebrate and protect Nebraska’s riparian landscapes.

Partner: Hartley Neighborhood, Lincoln, Nebraska

Date: 2024-

Assistance Areas: Community Engagement, Planting Design 

My partner Liz and I organized The Daffodil Blocks, a neighborhood beautification project that brings residents together to plant 2,000 early-blooming daffodils along two blocks leading to Hartley Elementary School, supported by a micro-grant from Civic Nebraska. Each spring, the flowers create a vibrant, welcoming pathway for children and families walking to the school and foster a sense of shared pride and connection among neighbors. We are honored to be nominated for the Dorothy Richardson Award for Resident Leadership by NeighborWorks America in recognition of this effort.

Prior to graduate school, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nicaragua. Starting with participatory analysis as a base, I worked with diverse groups to engage in a process to better understand their resources, obstacles and future visions in order to design and co-create interventions to achieve specific goals. In this role, I was able to get creative: to design medicinal plant gardens with the Ministry of Health, I created a game that I played with patients waiting to be seen by the doctor. To create a community center mural, I facilitated a visioning process to re-imagine the space and the imagery to best represent the town. To initiate a schoolyard beautification project, I led a participatory process with high school students to solicit user input and visualize the results on a map.